Crass Warfare

I'm going to give a personal reaction to the passage of the recent bill that has garnered attention from so many.

First, I want to talk about household income and expenditure.  The word "comfortable" is what I rely on in describing my own situation. For a change, compared to prior posts where I've talked about income distribution and income inequality, I'm not going to give any income numbers here.  I will just make a qualitative argument.  While we do have a mortgage on the house, we also have substantial equity in it.  Other than that, we don't carry debt.  Credit card bills are paid in full.  We have a decent income and a nice nest egg.  I'm 70 now, so will have to start withdrawing from my IRA in a few years.  We haven't planned for that yet - give some of it to the kids (or grandchildren if and when they appear on the scene) or sit on it just in case, which in my mind would be for long-term care expenses for which we don't have insurance.   I was treated for prostate cancer back in 2018 and while it is in remission now, I was told immediately afterward that I didn't qualify for long-term care insurance as a consequence.  My mother did eventually spend through her estate because of such expenditure and since I was handling her finances then, I've got that notion of spending through the estate firmly in my mind.  But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

With that, I should mention a few other things that are related.  We live in Champaign, Illinois, a college town where the cost of living is modest compared to more urban settings.  With various issues of arthritis and other health tsoris, primarily in my right hip and lower back, I don't travel much at all, as that seems to make things worse pain-wise.  I do have some of my father's miserly ways (he came of age during the Great Depression) so, for example, I will turn off the ceiling fan in a room when nobody else is there.  But this is more to appease my conscience than it is to save us money.  I really don't know what the dollar savings amount to from this behavior.  On the flip side, I do try to be generous on the rare occasions when I'm out with friends, especially when that's with folks who used to work for me back when I was doing campus ed tech.  I know that our relative incomes are advantaged in my favor, so I treat this as a kind of obligation.  

Given this background, I'm going to next consider how the recent bill will affect me.  I expect my Federal taxes to be lower, which as I understand things will be both because the SALT limits have been raised substantially and because the marginal tax rate that applies will be lower.  We'll see.  So, this will implicitly be a modest increase in income, which if the bill hadn't gotten such attention would largely go unnoticed by me and have no evident effect on family decisions.  

Given that, the reduction in Federal taxes seems to me like an implicit bribe.  A bribe for what, you might ask?  I interpret this as saying - take the money and then shut up about it.  Don't point out that others, with much higher income than yourself, are going to receive much more money.  There has been a good deal written about how regressive the bill is; for example, consider this recent opinion piece.  If there were enough people in a similar income situation to mine who complained about this regressivity, then the bill would be a political loser.  It might still end up that way, but if the complaints come mainly from those who are at or near the median in the income distribution, it will seem like the same old, same old.  I do have the feeling that the Republicans have bought out people in my income situation and have been doing that for a long time, certainly since the Bush tax cuts and perhaps as far back as the Reagan tax cuts.  

To go a bit further on this, I've felt for some time that Democratic Socialists, like Bernie Sanders and AOC, make a mistake because they focus on the beneficiaries of progressive income redistribution and, with the exception of the uber rich, ignore those who will make the necessary contributions so that the income redistribution happens along with a balanced budget.  In that scenario, people with income like mine are simply out of the picture, nonplayers without a role.  Instead, and I've written quite a lot about this in this blog, particularly under the tag Socialism Reconsidered, with posts that date back eight years or so, there should be an emphasis on Social Responsibility, which would then define our roles, both to make contributions to the income redistribution and to monitor the very rich, so they are held to account and don't weasel their way out of the their financial responsibilities to fellow citizens.  

This mistake has enabled the approach where folks in my income situation can be quietly selfish, perhaps make some charitable contributions to ease their consciences, but in no way does that solve the income redistribution problem, and the country becomes more and more unequal as a result.  And privately, this view is supported by a notion of meritocracy and the Just-World Hypothesis, even as the system seems more and more rigged by the already haves.

In this sense, the recent bill appears to me as more of the same, though more so.  Further, it demonstrates that those who want progressive income redistribution don't have a meaningful way to fight back. 

* * * * * 

What would a meaningful way of fighting back look like?  Recently I finished reading Tolstoy's War and Peace.  I am going to to use the history depicted there - mainly the close of the Napoleonic Wars, where the French invaded Russia, eventually took Moscow, but then the French troops lost all sense of discipline, began looting the city which had largely been abandoned, and found there wasn't enough to loot for them to survive, let alone thrive.  So the French withdrew, and kept on withdrawing, all the way back to France, with the vast majority of the remaining French troops dying along the way.  

Now it may seem quite unusual to look for a meaningful way to fight back by turning to historical fiction, in this case where it isn't even American history to consider.  But it's not so unusual for me to do so.  After all, I'm a complete outsider to the American political situation, for one, and I don't think the news and the limited number of opinion pieces I do read provide much fodder to come up with a helpful answer.  Consider that in March I wrote two blog posts that were directly or indirectly driven by this question, though I will readily admit that each also contained more than a little bit of wishful thinking.   

In each of these and in the present post as well, I take the various plutocrats as the enemy.  Given some of the egregious behavior perpetrated by rank and file MAGA types, one might consider them as the enemy.  In my view, however, these people have largely been played, with the antipathy and racism they openly exhibit stirred up to distract these people from the underlying economic issues.  If significant progressive income redistribution were to take place, my belief is that these folks would calm down substantially, though I'll admit there might be quite a lag between cause and effect.   

In the first of these posts from March, entitled Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?, I muse about what it would take to make a vote for conviction in a Senate trial of Trump, following a third Impeachment.  The two such trials we already had were each a sham.  Could such a trial be rigged in the other direction if suitable pressure were brought on the plutocrats who donate heavily to Senators and shower them with largesse? What pressure would need to be put on the plutocrats to make them behave in this way?  Who can exert such pressure?  I think it is necessary to ask these questions and try to identify answers, even if the conclusion is that it will be extremely difficult to orchestrate, so it is very unlikely to happen.  If there is a good answer to the original question about a meaningful way to fight back, it is not likely to be found directly.  One will need to noodle around quite a bit before finding some alternative that truly seems plausible.

The second post from March, entitled The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey, is a fantasy where the problem of plutocrat selfishness resolves itself on its own accord.  To that I'm sure the reader will respond something like - let's not hold our breath waiting for that to happen.  I concur.  But if some other plausible alternative is found, this one might provide cover for the Plutocrats, the equivalent of waving a virtual white flag.

Now let me turn to applying lessons from Tolstoy to the matter at hand.  The Russian Commander in Chief during the Napoleonic War was Kutuzov.   After the horrific battle at Borodino, where there were a significant number of casualties on both sides, Kutuzov had the Russian army retreat, even as other Russian generals were calling for further armed conflict.  Kutuzov faced additional criticism from allowing the French to take Moscow.  But what the other generals and various critics didn't understand was that Kutuzov was waging a war of attrition, which became especially evident after the French army left Moscow and suffered heavy losses in retreat, even without other battles being fought.  This protected the Russian army, one of Kutuzov's main goals.  And without issuing any formal instructions for this to happen, Kutuzov cleverly enlisted Russian peasants to engage in guerrilla tactics against the then dispersed French army.  The peasants were motivated both by pride in country and by wanting to capture French army supplies for themselves.  

Before getting to some guesswork about how metaphorical guerrilla tactics might be applied against current day plutocrats, I have to admit that I don't know any of them so I can only surmise as to their motivation and I also have to admit to my own confirmation bias in making such an assessment, even as when I used to teach economics I'd say that we can't make interpersonal comparisons of utility, a commonplace statement within the discipline.  Nonetheless, I will assert that for plutocrats wealth is not about the consumption that can be afforded, as they can purchase anything they desire to consume, but rather is about the power and control that can be wielded.  The uber rich like the tax cuts they will receive under the current bill because it is a recognition of their power.  Conversely, they have been so against Obamacare precisely because it was an overt challenge to their power.  

Thus, any guerrilla tactics that have a chance at success must be an assault on that power, done in such a way that the plutocrats feel they can't defend themselves.  And, if I'm reading the situation correctly, the timing is ripe now for this guerrilla activity because the bill that passed greatly overextended the political will of Republicans in Congress, so there is likely to be substantial inertia now rather than any attempt at follow up legislation.  These Republicans will have shot their wad and, at least in regard to national politics, this means the plutocrats can claim victory but then should probably go into hiding for a while.  If, however, the plutocrats start to experience personal defeats that they feel they can't prevent, they won't have offsetting political opportunities to express their power.  

The Russian army did pursue the French army while the latter retreated, keeping their distance but encouraging the French to keep moving quickly.  The peasants were aware of these movements and in this way Kutuzov coordinated the guerrilla fighting.  It is likely that the current day version will also need coordinating.  But as the activity would mainly be illegal, the Democratic Party itself can't serve as the coordinating body.  If the guerrilla activity were nonetheless happening, Democrats could argue that when they retake the White House, those found guilty of crimes for pursuing the guerrilla activity will be pardoned.  After all, there is quite a recent precedent for that.  So, there can be more than tacit endorsement of the guerrilla activity.  Nonetheless, the leadership for it will have to come from elsewhere.

As to the aims and tactics of the guerrilla activity, it would be lovely to invoke stories of Robin Hood into the narrative at this point, income redistribution in the small if you will.  Is that feasible?  I don't know.  Beyond that, some of this might entail destruction of property, acts that the plutocrats can't defend against, while other parts of it might entail creating personal embarrassment for the plutocrats, where again they are helpless to prevent this.  With that, one might imagine a real physical presence that is disabling as well as an online presence (hacking if you will) which is likewise disabling.   An initial coordinating activity might be to produce a list of the plutocrats along with their significant holdings.  I'd guess their numbers would be somewhere in the low thousands.  Those who might engage in the guerrilla activity likely would number two or three orders of magnitude more than that.  Somehow, the tactics would need to leverage that numerical advantage.

The reader will want specifics here which, unfortunately, I can't supply as I have no experience in this domain.  My intuition tells me that for specifics it will require either people who formerly were in one  of the Intelligence Services or people who actively engaged in industrial espionage.  Such people will have to self-identify yet remain largely invisible for this to work.  Does that requirement in itself render the entire thing a pipe dream?  I don't know.

As I wrote at the end of the Seven Days in May post, I write these posts not to come up with an implementation plan, as I'm not competent to do that, but rather to get the reader to think through the possibilities.  And if as a byproduct some of the readers start in on War and Peace, all the better.